Website Domains – What’s in a name?

It’s important to choose your website domain name carefully. You may be tempted to go for something that’s witty, or specifically your business name but for small businesses this is actually counter-productive.

Company Names

Big businesses that have strong branding and big marketing budgets will tend to use their company name as they rely on this name as part of their branding to generate website traffic. For example, Apple use www.Apple.com, because this is what everyone would already be searching for to find their products.

However, imagine a similar, small company called Banana that sold phones, if they chose a domain name like www.banana.co.uk, google would log their website and think it was something to do with bananas. That means when a potential customer searches for “Cheap Phones” on Google, Google is less likely to consider showing them www.banana.co.uk than it is to show their competitor “www.cheapphones.co.uk”.

So, simply by giving your website a domain name that is relevant to your business, you give your business a helping hand to getting more traffic (potential customers) to see it, without even trying.

Search Terms

More specifically, you can target you website domain to be an exact search term used by potential customers when they try to find a business like yours. For example. you’ve decided to make your website name something relevant to your business (Great job!) so instead of a company name, you have decided on something like www.onlinephones.co.uk. This isn’t too bad, it’s relevant and tells the customer exactly what this website is all about. However, it COULD be even better!

To improve the domain name even more you need to take a look at what people will be searching for who you want to find to your website. What does this mean?

Well, when a customer wants a phone, they most likely will not type into the search engine (such as Google), “online phones”. They may however type in something like “Cheap phones” or “PAYG Phones” or even “smart phones”. You need to think about which of these search terms is a) low on competition but high on customer conversion/potentials and b) Suitable for your business without excluding any aspect of it. You can then turn any of these search terms into your new customer grabbing website domain!

We’ve Got your Back

Don’t worry, if all this sounds a little bit too confusing for you, remember we specially select your website domain name for you as standard in all of our packages. You can choose not to use this service if you wish, but we are more than happy to provide you with a personal Search Engine Optimised domain name for your new website as a part of any of our website package deals. We will also buy the domain for a minimum of 1 year as a part of your package.